When you send out a Honeit candidate presentation, our analytics dashboard provides insights into how your links are interacting with the world. Under the Top Cities section, you might occasionally notice a long string of numbers (like 5815135) listed instead of a city name.
Here is why that happens and what it means for your presentation links.
First: It’s not your computer or your setup!
The most important thing to know is that seeing numbers here has nothing to do with your computer, your network, or your personal setup.
These location statistics only look at the network of the person who opened the presentation, not the person who sent it.
We track "Where", not "Who"
To clarify how our link analytics work, we do not track who opens the link; no personal details, names, or email addresses are ever captured. Instead, our link-tracking provider looks at the viewer's general internet connection to estimate where the link was opened from, which is why the dashboard usually displays cities.
Why do numbers appear instead of a city?
When you see a number instead of a city name, it simply means the recipient's network didn't pass along an exact municipal city to the tracking provider. This happens entirely on the viewer's side when they open the presentation using:
A mobile cellular phone connection (4G/5G)
Their company's corporate VPN or security gateway
A privacy-protecting browser feature (such as Apple iCloud Private Relay)
When the external tracking service cannot isolate an exact city on the viewer's end, it doesn't just leave a blank space. Instead, it automatically falls back to showing a broad regional database code.
(For example: If you see 5815135, that is the global geographic database ID for the State of Washington).
Why can't we change this?
Because this location information is retrieved automatically from third-party internet registries based on the recipient's connection, it isn't something Honeit can edit, rename, or control.